tagged with posthumanism:

I'm excited to be presenting at this year's ASA conference in Atlanta with the incredible Suzanne Bost, AnaLouise Keating, and Kelli Zaytoun. Our panel/roundtable, titled 'Ethical Emergency and Posthumanist Emergence' interrogates, broadly, alternatives to humanism for and within compromised times. My offering is framed as a series of notes on post- or more-than-human theories and methodologies ranging from Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, to Kathleen Stewart and Erin Manning. Here, I'm trying to tap into more explicitly political theories to find resonances that posthumanism might attune with, allowing us to thinking beyond the individuated subject of humanism towards a more processual conception of subjectivity, relationality, and politics. I'm really looking forward to the conversation. You can read the notes and view the presentation below.

This weekend, I'm presenting on the intersections of autothoery, affect theory, and posthumanism at Capacious Journal's Affect Inquiry/Making Spaces Conference. The paper itself is a messy tangle of things. It's interested in the resonances between affect theory and diffraction, an anti-representationalist methodology initially proposed by Donna Haraway and later refined by Iris van der Tuin. The paper frames autotheory as about diffraction, as an apparatus for describing and mapping diffraction, and as enacting diffraction patterns within the encounter of reading. In surveying texts we might think of as autothoeretical or doing autotheoretical work--Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, Eileen Myles's Afterglow, and Suzanne Antonetta's Body Toxic, among others--I attempt to articulate how our encounters with these texts reconfigure our relation to both human and nonhuman forces. Autotheory becomes a potent resource for mapping and enacting new territories and for exploring the possibilities and boundaries of subject formation, knowing full well its contingency.

I am excited to be participating in the Affect Inquiry/Making Spaces Conference (Aug 8-11) hosted by Capacious Journal. My paper, titled 'diffracting autotheory,' extends my current research in impersonal agency and posthuman affectivity, smeared across the terrain of autotheory. In coupling diffraction and autotheory, I hope to elucidate alternative modalities of subjectivity predicated on affective entanglement. You can find the full abstract below.

I recently reviewed Stacy Alaimo's Exposed over at ASAP/J. The review focuses on Alaimo's utilization of art and activism that foregrounds the trans-corporeal nature of subjectivity and embodiment. By interweaving geo- and biopolitical concerns into her theorization of the anthropocene, Alaimo's work 'reorients attention to the seemingly mundane political and aesthetic practices of co-inhabitation that shape humans and their environments.' You can find the review at ASAP/J.

My current project/chapter has me returning to Mark Z. Danielewski's work, a novelist who's been with me since I first thought about teaching, and latter became an important fixture for how I think about literature, and then, again, latter, became an even more important figure for how I think about ethics, (non)humans, and so much more. Although the chapter is specifically interested in inter-weaving Danielewski's most recent set of novels, collectively known as The Familiar, into contemporary posthumanism, figuring The Familiar as another resource for theorizing relationality among (non)humans, it's also given me a chance to revisit his work as a whole. Specifically, I'm looking at some of the 'paratextual' (if you can call it that) projects surrounding The Familiar including a talk that later became an article called 'Parable No. 9: The Hopeless Animal and the End of Nature.' Given in Cologne, Germany in the Fall of 2010, the talk catalyzed my interest in posthumanism, actor network theory, and speculative realism (though I've largely abandoned the latter two in favor of the former), and continues to inform how I think about hope and our relation to animals. By that same token, I'm hoping that 'Parable No. 9' will offer insight into Danielewski's novels---there's clearly cross-contamination---as well as provide fodder for positioning his work among other posthuman theorists.